Well I took a gamble at a listing on ebay that simply said '3500 Atari ST disks. Collection only'. I bid, won the lot for £20, drove 40 miles this afternoon and picked up two massive boxes full of floppies and bought them home.

Talk about a treasure trove! One box was full of game cracks (the usual Pompey, Automation, etc) including some weird menu disks I've never heard of before. The other box was full of demos, source code and PD apps - including again a load of things I've never heard of, and some that ring vague bells

I'm going to have fun going through this lot!

Does anyone remember a demo menu / packing crew by the name of 'Swamp Juice' ? because there appear to be a load of stuff by them in here. I know I'll probably bin most of the disks, but I do love going through collections like this for the odd gem you just know you're going to find I'll post more as I dig.

I look forward to images of any rear menus and the source code collections etc appearing very soon

Just hope you only dump shall we say the "popular titles" already in our scene (PP, Automation etc)

As for the name Swamp Juice, for some reason it rings a bell - but cant for the life of me remember if it was Atari related (might have read in a scroll text or even seen a disk) or just some dark disturbing area of teenage mind at the time

Ok it took me hours, but I finally sorted the disks all out! I don't know who's collection this was (the guy I bought it from had just 'acquired' it with a job lot of retro stuff), but the collection is superb. It's an absolute dream ST collection from back in the day - I mean this guy didn't throw away a THING!

I don't know about you lot, but I was only a kid back then and disks were expensive, so I'd copy over stuff I didn't want any more with the newer releases. Whoever built this collection didn't, he kept *everything*. I literally had to sort through every single Automation, Medway, Pompey and BBC disk they ever released. I put all of those aside into the garage, which saved me a lot of space because they're well covered on the 'net already. What is left is an amazing mixture of stuff. I think whoever owned these disks was a member of a group called 'STD' (nice huh?!) because there are stacks of STD Sample Disks, Demo Compiles and STD Demos. I also found loads of Vidi ST and Replay 4 stuff, so they're probably all sampled sound demos coded in STOS.

Anyway I'm digging through the most interesting sounding titles now and will let you all know what I uncover - for now though here is a photograph of the mountain of disks that was left AFTER I removed all the games cracks!

Cheers,

Rich

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Looks like memorex disks. I know what you mean about copying over the floppies back then they were expensive. Have any Ancient Celts menu disks in that lot? What a mountain of disks! I prefer Mt. Dew myself. Well hopefully you can find some diamonds in the rough.

I have started to MSA the disks onto my Falcon, which is a tedious process to say the least But I managed to do around 80 tonight which isn't bad, and have attached a text file listing of them all. I found an interesting demo I've never seen before called 'The Mega XXXX Demo' (it's not a pr0n demo). It appears to be by a chap called 'Steve', and 'SJM' is the only reference that appears in it. It's over 2 disks, and the effects are quite neat in a standard scroller-trick sort of way. On the second disk there are guest screens by ACO, which are written in STOS, so I don't know if the rest of this demo is - looking at it, it could have been. Here's a screen shot if this rings any bells?

Also there is a disk with 'The Other Side of the Spoon by ULM' written on it, but I cannot get this disk to read at all I always loved the ULM 'Darkside of the Spoon' demo - it was a real classic, but I didn't know there was a sequel, does anyone have it?

On a side note I'm having real trouble with MSA on my Falcon.. lots of the disks are formatted up to track 80, and MSA just can't read that track in most cases, which makes it fail the entire bloody disk - VERY annoying. I try floimg on the PC too, but that more often than not doesn't copy the disk properly - it gives no errors, but the software nearly always bombs out (3 bombs) other than in rare cases. I downloaded JAYMSA which looks great, but crashes when you click 'Disk Compression' in the menu, right after entering a file name.

Pah

Cheers,

Rich

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LGD is staying looking the same only much better (you'll see) and it will be 100% CAB compatible too. It has also moved totally away from 'games' and is now on everything ST.. demos, mags, the lot.

Brume - I had a quick look at the 'missing' list and I know for a fact I have various menus listed as missing from Blues Brothers, a few Clockwork Orange cracks, Deadly FX, DodgeySoft, Electronic, Electric Blue, Evolution, a few G-Force, Mantronix, lots of Northside disks, some Now5, some Pure Energy and a few Rebels. Those are just disks I found while sorting them into piles, there might be others. I don't have complete sets of all of the above, but the more holes we can fill, the more complete the collection will be.

Does anyone know why JayMSA crashes so badly for me? (see my post above), it would really help me image up some of the more tricky disks.

I develop a free Word (for Windows) add-in that's available for Word 2007 upwards. It's a fix-it toolbox that will allow power Word users to fix document errors. You can find it at: http://www.mikestoolbox.co.uk

Ok I went through the box of games I have up here (the rest are in the garage, I only have so much room in my office!) and Brume - here are the disks from your MISSING list that I definitely have infront of me. Please note that doesn't mean they will image successfully, but I'll try my best:

Well once you get them all MSAed pm me and we can trade. I have about 3000 disks I have coppied into my ST for the BBS. I have just transferd them all to the PC and have them on prvate FTP server. We can trade if you want.